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Yushchenko's teenage son turns out to own the copyrights to all Orange Revolution slogans. Is he serious?

ne’s fast-living First Son, Andriy Yushchenko, is making money in a sleazy way. According to State Tax Administration deputy head Mykola Katerynchuk, President Viktor Yushchenko’s 19-year-old son owns the copyrights for the slogans and catch-phrases used during the Orange Revolution. These presumably include “Tak!” the omnipresent horseshoe symbol, and so on.

How did Andriy get his hands on these rights? Katerynchuk simply gave them to him.

“I personally gave it to him,” Katerynchuk told the daily Kommersant on Aug. 2. “That was after the victory in the third round. The transfer of the brands was verified by notaries and all these brands currently belong to Andriy Yushchenko.”

In other words, Andriy was given a gold mine – a gold mine that was excavated, if you’ll let us extend the metaphor, by the citizens who took to the streets to support the Orange Revolution. Though the situation is complicated by Ukraine’s ineffective copyright enforcement, in principle every time someone sells a “Tak!” calendar in a bookstore, Andriy gets a cut.

How utterly disgusting. It’s beyond bad taste for Yushchenko’s son to be (allegedly) profiting from the Orange Revolution. The Revolution that elevated Viktor Yushchenko to the presidency was powered by tens of millions of Ukrainians. If it belongs to anyone, it belongs to them. Andriy Yushchenko has no right to be making a profit from it. No one who slept out in the snow protecting Viktor Yushchenko did so to provide Yushchenko’s kid with a cash cow. And the idea of Katerynchuk giving the president’s lucrative intellectual property is almost unbelievably shabby. Is it even legal?

Come on, kid. Come on, President Yushchenko. What’s going on here? We demand an explanation – and demand that whatever money been made be either returned or used for better purposes than paying for young Andriy’s Cristal champagne tab at Decadence House. We can think of effective charity organizations that could put that money to use.

In fact, maybe Andriy Yushchenko should take that money and start a charitable foundation (maybe he’s already doing so). Among other things, it will give a kid who seems to have too much time on his hands and energy something worthwhile to do.